THE EMERGENCE OF THE HUMAN

2 3 R T H E E M E R G E N C E O F T H E H U M A N J O H N K O E T H E You can watch it as you walk through the U≈zi: Gold leaf, egg tempura, gold halos on the flat saints And on the flat Madonna and detached bambino Balanced precariously on her lap, her eyes to one side. The composition is meant to look like something you can’t see, To illuminate a mystery. Yet now and then some vaguely Contoured hills replace the gold, a figure seems to look at you Or look like someone from the artist’s town, or the baby’s Features soften into the faint suggestion of a smile. The impulse is always towards the truth, the only question is The kind of truth: iconic or demystified, a representation of the word Or the word made flesh. Siena’s figures floated on the surface, Shorn of their misgivings and desires, while somewhere down the road Something was happening of which Siena didn’t have a clue. You can see it happen in the landscapes in the background, Drifting from nowhere in particular into those bluish Mountains harboring the caves I saw last week; in Christ’s Contorted features made of paint that feels like flesh, That yields a massive Holy Family without halos; In the reinvention of mythology, and then within mythology, The shift from Venus chaste and balanced in the foam, Caressed by winds, to Venus lying on a bed with a small dog at her feet, A ‘‘nude woman’’ who stares at you indi√erently and reeks of sex. And then the floodgates open and the world comes rushing in: 2 4 K O E T H E Y The ‘‘crude, expressive naturalism’’ of Caravaggio and his followers – Medusa on a shield, screaming from her mouth’s black hole, And then a real Cardinal, palpably corrupt, and Bacchus As a smirking peasant boy, his upper body glistening with sweat, And then a blood-soaked dental scene of overwhelming cruelty, then a thug; All hanging in an exhibition in the Pitti Palace just across the bridge. ‘‘And I am sweating a lot by now’’ as I make my way along Via Romana, Following this trajectory – a trajectory that started with a mystery And peeled away its layers to reveal the human form inside – To its logical conclusion in La Specola, the anatomical museum Filled with specimens of almost every living thing, And then the finally human body, open for the world to see, Like David flayed, or St. Sebastian disemboweled Instead of punctured here and there by arrows, and brains Where golden halos used to be. Somewhere in the remote past There was a message from an angel. What happened next Depends on whom you ask, but if you ask me, I’d say it led to these – These wax models of the body, with its veins, entrails and nerves, From which nothing is missing except its old significance; As though the history of art were the story of its disappearance, Of the deflation of the word into a slowly disappearing Word made flesh, of the flesh demystified at last. ...